American Sniper (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                 2 hrs & 12 min, color, 2014
   
How strange and ironic it is that a motion picture that concerns itself with brash courage should be so lacking in that very quality.  The true story of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who has probably seen more combat than any other man who has ventured into the Middle East military arena, with a record of sniper hits far surpassing all others of his compatriots, should lend itself to a diligent and thorough and unique study of war’s effect upon even the most superior combatants.  Who else has been the closest to the fire? 

We have heard a lot about PTSD; in no previous military commitment that our nation has made on a grand scale has more attention been given to the aftereffects of exposure to combat – the war the fighter brings home with him, in so many respects more formidable than the one he tries to leave behind.  The media have not only given scrupulous report of so many examples of physically maimed men who walk around with prosthetic legs and arms, but the magnifying glass has also been applied to those with relatively little physical injury but who have psychic and emotional scars that are just as handicapping and debilitating.  I expected much about this phenomenon from this rather lengthy biopic.    

What we have instead is an exercise in overkill – literally – as an ambitious action film would have it.  Instead of a thorough character study, I found myself crawling with our “hero” through one bloody battle encounter after another during a total of four deployments.  I was forced to trudge and trudge through the dust and grime, more and more grunginess, more and more shootouts and dangerous combat operations.  I am sure we have seen a body count here that has set a new record.  I am used to those high counts in a fictional drama – spy fare, cop fare, cloak and dagger, etc. – but what made the scene so grueling this time was the factual basis for the details.  The one-on-one encounter with enemies, allegedly derived from actual military files, gets much further under the skin in an oppressive sort of way for a sensitive viewer such as myself.  I felt dragged along over the terrain of the battlefield, not led through it with taste and perspective.

A sniper has the task of protecting the lives of the troops by taking out would-be snipers from the enemy side and anyone on the move to ambush or sneak attack those troops.  He must have eyes sharper and an aim narrower than anyone else who carries a gun.  Kyle ran up a legendary score of killings, serving the war effort for four years in Iraq from 2005 until 2009, carrying home all kinds of medals and commendations for bravery before he retired and ironically was killed in February 2013 in his own country, at a practice shooting range in Texas, by a demented civilian of unknown motive.  He was only 39 years old when it happened.  (The killer is currently serving a life sentence without parole.)  It was before he died that Kyle managed to write his best-selling autobiography of the same name as the movie, published in 2012.  Clint Eastwood grabbed it up for a movie adaptation, which he produced and directed. 

Bradley Cooper’s range as an actor is well known; he is perhaps the most focused of any up and coming male star of the screen, but I do not feel as if his powerful presence got the chance to reveal itself enough in the playing of Kyle.  What he does he does potently, but so much more ground could have been covered and explored. 
 
Speaking as a writer, I perceive that a far better way to have adapted the book would have been an out-of-sequence approach.   I would have begun the film with his final return from the war, perhaps a regaling of the man for his exploits and achievements and his final step back into civilian life.  Then I would have been selective with flashbacked moments in combat that are triggered by his painful adjustment to his new reality.  Four years elapsed between his discharge and his death.  What he underwent internally during that time would have been a theater of war far more worth visiting, far more instructive and far more absorbing.    

There are two instances that give us a taste, but only a taste, of what I am talking about.  At an outdoor family gathering his little boy is doing some rough playing with a dog, something the boy is not new at and something he is obviously enjoying.  Chris loses his sense of time and place and rushes to “rescue” the boy and starts to deal a death blow to the dog, when his wife Taya stops him.  What triggers this reaction may well be his having once killed a child carrying a grenade for the insurgents and about to wipe out many of his buddies.  He has learned bitterly about children being exposed to lethal forces, when he has had to release that force himself.  But that is only a guess on my part.  A counselor’s attempt later to engage him in discussing this incident he unfortunately rebuffs, and there is no further reference to the matter. 

The other takes place outside a hospital maternity ward.  Chris is looking at his newborn daughter lying in her tiny crib, when the girl starts not only to cry but to scream, demanding feeding.  The squall goes on and on.  The nurse behind the partition acts as if she does not hear Kyle calling to her trying to direct her attention to the baby, and his raised voice she ignores as she dotes upon another baby.  He is so upset that he pounds on the glass, but to no avail.  The nurse cannot hear.  I assume this is a dream sequence, because even if the glass sealing off a maternity ward is constructed with sound proofing (as some of them are), a trained nurse would not turn a deaf ear to a screaming infant and the hysterical father’s pounding would set up a vibration if it did nothing else.  

Such hallucinatory experiences on the part of veterans who are back in the States have been widely reported, but how susceptible Kyle was to such psychic confusions remains obscure.  It seems as if the screenplay is depicting him as so superhuman that he supposedly recovers from these moments with no help or support from any direction, including the loving and loyal wife, played smartly by Sienna Miller. 

Over the years during which she sees little of him due to his repeated departures for the battlefield, she lets him know how remote he is becoming from the family.  He is not the man she married.  She warns him: “You’ve got to make it back to us.”  She also delivers what may well be the most profound line of dialogue in the whole script: “You can only circle the flame but so long” before you are pulled into it, and maybe consumed by it.  But after he is home for keeps we are never treated to her insights and misgivings again.  Does he make it back?

The film makers apparently do not have the courage to explore the internal war Kyle must have waged, once he was home from the external one.  The movie is almost over before that fourth deployment ever comes to an end.  Those years following are just skimmed over.  We never get to see how the man prevailed over his demons or if he ever did.  Before we know it, that fateful day of his death has arrived, a day on which he acts as if he has eluded his internal foe.  All right, maybe he has, but how?   Why not let us in on that process?  I have great respect for Mr. Eastwood; he has turned out some great work both as actor and director in his forty-eight years in the business, and technically the picture is Class A.  But I am disappointed that only one war Chris Kyle fought is treated in depth.  There surely is another, however little or much he discusses it in his book. 


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

"The Road to Character" by David Brooks (Book Review by Bob Racine)

                                Published by Random House, 2015

Anyone who watches the nightly News Hour on Public Television with any regularity should be familiar with Mr. Brooks.  As a pundit and columnist for the New York Times he is called upon each Friday evening, along with Mark Shields, a syndicated columnist, to analyze the week’s news in depth and make prognostications on where the institutions of our government and society are trending.   His most recent book feels to me like a departure from his usual stock in trade, though that may be because I have not read any other of his writings; I only know, and look forward to, his weekly spoken comments in front of the camera that comprise one of the highlights of what I consider the best news program on any TV channel.  (Others who rank with him besides Shields are Michael Gerson and Ruth Marcus, who sometimes fill in when one of these two regulars is absent.)  

The book is based on an assumption that most of us who are entangled in the modern world can hardly refute – that in this twenty-first century, character is not the first consideration when people are planning their lives.  We are living in the age of what Brooks calls the Big Me.  He takes to task the widespread idea that one can do anything one sets one’s mind to do, all by one’s self.  And the notion that joy and satisfaction are the product of self-assertion and aggressive self-advancement!  And the claim, either direct or implied, that “I am special!”  He asserts that there are two faces to each one of us, two sides of the coin, the external person and the internal one, what he calls Adam I and Adam II.  Let me permit him to tell you in his own words, from his Introduction, how he differentiates between the two:

“Adam I (the external) wants to build, create, produce, and discover things.  He wants to have high status and win victories.”  Adam II, the internal, “wants to love intimately, to sacrifice self in the service of others, to live in obedience to some transcendent truth, to have a cohesive soul that honors creation and one’s own possibilities.” 

There is another set of contrasting terms he uses to elucidate this duality of human nature: the “resume virtues” and the “eulogy virtues.”  The former consists of what you offer as proof of your qualifications for one job or another, proof of your accumulated experience, your education, your visible and certifiable attributes that you hope will advance a career and build prestige.  Adam I in other words!  The latter, the eulogy virtues, are those that one would want to be remembered for at life’s close, how one related to others, how one demonstrated caring, what one achieved in service to high ideals, how much of a lasting gift to the surroundings one became during that lifetime.  The very essence of Adam II!    

Lurking at the margin of each observation he makes is an air of the confessional.  He makes clear at one point that he wrote the book “to save my own soul.”  Yeah!  Nothing less!  I do not believe he meant by this that in writing it he was trying to earn his salvation.  In a separate on-line communication recently he set forth his idea of character in its truest form: 

“About once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. . . They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued.  You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude.  They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing.  They are not thinking about themselves at all.”  He goes on to say:  “It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved . . . that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.”    

He takes us through a wide spectrum of biographical material, very detailed and thoroughly researched, of people who having completed their earthly lives and are among those in his estimation who had to struggle to find their way out of absorption in Adam I to arrive at a life in Adam II.  He casts a very wide net.  Although it confounds me as to how he thought writing about people in history could turn him into that quality person he wishes he were, I do have to concede that he is thorough about it.   He leaves no stone unturned.  A student of history would be enthralled.

Of course, all the individuals whose lives he visits are deceased.  He probably chose the dead over the contemporary because they have all completed their journeys and supposedly for that reason best embody the motif of the eulogy virtues.  And he is not skimpy with his material; he is, if nothing else, quite thorough and scrupulously well organized.  He errs perhaps more on the side of two much than not enough.  He packs a lot of words into this 270-page tome.

For this reason I do not suggest that the reader take on the entire work.  If you read the Introduction and the last long chapter, you have the heart and soul of his presentation.  Think of the intervening chapters as a smorgasbord.  Decide which biographies stir your interest and curiosity.   Naturally with a review in mind I had to ingest the whole thing, but there are some people he treats who failed to arouse mine.  These are his choices in alphabetical order, and I leave it to each reader to choose what is appealing:  Augustine of Hippo, Dorothy Day, Dwight Eisenhower, George Eliot (alias Mary Anne Evans), Samuel Johnson, George C. Marshall, Frances Perkins, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin.

What we have is the sort of publication in which just about everything the author wants to say is contained in each and every chapter.  If you make a thorough study of any part at random, you are likely to come away from the study feeling as if you have heard everything the author wants to say.  Each and every chapter opens up the total trajectory of the theme.  His writing does not exactly build, one layer on top of another leading toward some ultimate summation.  Each is a special wording, a particular expression of the basic premise. 

Let me not give the impression that I hold any part of the book in serious question.  I found nothing that I would disagree with propositionally.  His judgments about maturity and moral consciousness are quite pithy and sound.  He claims not to be a generous person, but he is more than generous with the space he takes to enlighten us.  He has not written a fiery encyclical or thrown down any gauntlet; he speaks like a friend to a reasonable audience.  He appreciates the fact that character is not something that can be laid out in easy steps.  The road to this character cannot be reduced to a formula or “a shopping list.”  Adam II has to be cultivated over time, a molding and shaping process that stems from a lot of hard internal work and struggle. 

I only wish he had told us about how he personally is undergoing this process.  His is a little too much of an intellectual approach at times.  He never quite gets out of the role of commentator.  Next time maybe he will open his own heart a little wider, tell us about how his own narrative is shaping up, give us more personal testimony.  For all he has put down on paper, he never discusses his own personal life.  Who is David Brooks?  Where is he on the journey?   What transcendent truth is he aiming to be obdient to?

Or maybe he should forget about historical figures and delve further into the lives and experiences of these people he says he meets and admires so much, who he claims he would like to emulate.  Their stories I would guess are every bit as absorbing and would speak to us today with far more incisiveness.  At any rate, he does not make clear how his new personal experiment is coming along.  Has he “saved his soul,” to any extent at all?  Brooks should not belittle the career choice he has made or what he has done with it, as he seems on the verge of doing.  We need the commentators, the pundits, the columnists.  Their overview of what is going on in the world does great good.  His insights, and, yes, even his scholarship, serve a very moral and spiritual purpose.  I am not always sure whether I agree with what he says, but I for one thrive on his words – every week, every season of the year.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.